This article was published
in the April, 2000 issue of Culture Wars magazine. Want
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WARNING:Contains explicit language

"Modesty," according to the
Catechism of
the Catholic Church, "protects the intimate center of the
person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden.
It is ordered to chastity to whose sensitivity it bears witness.
It guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in
conformity with the dignity of persons and their solidarity."

This thought, although probably not in those exact words,
crossed my mind as I sat in Carroll Hall of Madeleva Hall at
St. Marys College, Notre Dame, Indiana, which bills itself
as this nations premier Catholic college for women, listening
to a performance of The Vagina Monologues. The point of the play
according to one of the 18 or 19 year old, presumably Catholic
girls who were mouthing the lines of the play like some bright
pupil in the final round of a spelling bee, was to "reclaim
cunt." To reclaim it from whom was not immediately evident
as the 12 or so performers then began chanting like the croaking
chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes, "cunt, cunt, cunt,
cunt, cunt."

"Cunt,
cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt," chanted the young
ladies whose
presumably Catholic parents were paying $20,000
a year for the privilege of being in this play. If anyone thought that the Holy Cross nuns who run St. Marys
College were going to burst in and put and end to this obscene
performance, that suspicion was laid to rest after a glance at
the program showed that the lead role in the play was being performed
by Sister Linda Cors, CSC, a Holy Cross nun herself and the person
on campus in charge of something called Volunteer Services.

"Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt," chanted Sister Linda
wearing a black T-shirt with the question "Can you say vagina?"
on the front and "Its coming" on the back. Having
seen the nuns habits come and go with all sorts of dowdy
polyester variations in between, I found myself wondering whether
this was the new habit for the Holy Cross nuns.

"Modesty," according to the Catechism of the Catholic
Church, "keeps silence or reserve where there is evident
risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet" (#2522). Discretion
may be the better part of valor, but it was evidently not Sister
Lindas long suit. Before she worked herself up into a sweat
chanting dirty words at the young Catholic ladies in the audience,
Sister Linda, adopted the persona of
Eve Ensler, the author of
the play, which according to the accompanying publicity, won
an Obie award in 1998, and explained that the point of all this
was "to look at our bodies and examine the place they hold
in our lives."

Feminist psychology is nothing if not dualistic. Women according
to this point of view "own" their bodies, which are
wonderful "machines." The quotes here are all from
Our Bodies Ourselves, the feminist tract of the 70s which
established the dualistic psychology of feminism and the concomitant
alienation of self from body once and for all. I know all this
because the last time I was in Carroll Hall it was as an assistant
professor giving a talk on Natural Family Planning, opposing
the integral view of noncontraceptive sex to the mechanistic
view proposed by the feminists, who were then bent on running
their own machines. That talk got me fired. It was the last time
Natural Family Planning (NFP) was proposed to the young ladies of St. Marys College.
In the intervening 20 years, the feminists have consolidated
their hold on campus, prohibiting, as they do elsewhere when
they get enough power, any mention of sex that is not propaganda
for lesbianism and masturbation.

Like the Marquis de Sade, the feminists believe that "woman
is a machine for voluptuousness." The only quarrel they
have with the Divine Marquis is who gets to run the machine.
Sister Linda was clearing that question up for the girls in the
audience. "I was worried about my vagina," she told
the audience until that breakthrough moment when she realized
"My vagina is me." "My clitoris," said one
of the girls following Sister Lindas lead, "was the
essence of me. I had to be my vagina."

In case the young ladies in the audience were at a loss as
to how they could become their vaginas, Sister Linda and the
girls provided a virtual instruction manual. The play was pure
feminist agit-prop, which is to say propaganda for lesbianism
and masturbation. As one has come to expect with this sort of
thing, procreation is described in maximally disgusting terms,
and heterosexual sex is invariably described as brutality and
rape. The symbol of heterosexual sex, which is to say unapproved
sex, in The Vagina Monologues is the "rape camp in Bosnia,"
one of the mass media ploys which got used to justify NATO intervention
and then, like the 100,000 murdered Albanians in Kosovo, promptly
disappeared down the memory hole after it had served its purpose.
The only time it appears now is in plays like The Vagina Monologues,
which warns the girls against things heterosexual. Things like
rape camps in Bosnia and, of course, the family.

The family, in case you didnt know it already, is the
main locus of violence against women. "Home," chirped
one of the girl actresses whose father is paying $20,000 a year
to send her to St. Marys, "is a very scary place."
"Shelters" of sort the girls were to sign up and work
at following the play "are the first place women find comfort
in the place of other women." Just what kind of comfort
these poor women, who "suffer terrible violence" because
"they have no access to therapy," find there soon becomes
evident when the same young actress describes how one "woman
met another woman at a shelter and they fell in love. They now
have a beautiful life together."

Lesbianism, as you probably gathered, was portrayed in uniformly
glowing terms throughout the play. Even a graphic description
of a 13-year-old girl being sexually molested was proposed in
unabashedly positive terms, primarily because it was a 24-year-old
lesbian who was doing the molesting. No one in the cast, least
of all Sister Linda, seemed to have any objection to child pornography,
as long as it was being perpetrated by lesbians.

Lest one think that the faculty and students at St. Marys
College were in any way original in their choice of drama, the
performance there was one of 150 similar performances at colleges
across the country during the week of Valentines Day. The
project was known as V-Day, which gives some indication of how
clever the feminists are. It was part of the general assault
on decency which has become commonplace at institutions of higher
education in the United States now.

"The core," James
Atlas, chronicler of academic fads, announced a recent issue
of the New Yorker, "has become hard core." Porn studies
is now taught at NYU, Columbia, and Northwestern. Porn star/performance
artist Annie Sprinkle is, according to Atlas, "a popular
draw" on campuses. Professor Linda Williams of the University
of California at Berkeley, delivered the keynote address at the
World Pornography Conference in LA, which was hosted by the University
of California at Northridge. Atlas, of course, portrays all of
this in typically Whiggish fashion as some new-found liberation
of the heretofore uptight halls of academe. But others are not
so sure that is the most accurate description of what is happening.
Candace de Russy, a trustee with the State University of New
York system, claims that campuses like SUNY New Paltz, which
hosted The Vagina Monologues as well as another venture in lesbian
propaganda aptly entitled Revolting Behavior, attract large numbers
of freshman only to have equally large numbers of freshmen drop
out after their first year. She attributes the high attrition
rate to the assault an their sense of modesty which the sexual
liberationist agenda necessarily entails.

De Russy failed in her first attempt to get the president
of SUNY New Paltz fired primarily because the forces of sexual
liberation and the regime are one and the same thing in this
country but also because the battle was enjoined essentially
on the liberationists terms. There is no point calling
for outrage. Outrage has no purchase on the average mind anymore.
Richard Weaver talked about this phenomenon of dulling and stultification
over 50 years ago. Things have gone down hill from then. One
of the major benefits the ruling class gets from the promotion
of pornography and obscenity is the dulling of outrage which
invariably follows from it, and with outrage gone, gone too is
the motivation to act. The main result of the widespread dissemination
of transgressive imagery is passivity, and passivity on the part
of the population is always a benefit to those in power.

This, of course, is not how pornographys defenders portray
it. The standard academic line justifying the showing of pornography
on campus is that who collaborate with the industry are disseminating
information, and, after all, disseminating information is what
universities do, isnt it. What the academic defenders of
one-handed sex dont discuss is the fact that pornography
also exterminates thought, and the answer to why academics would
want to do that lies in the purpose of "higher education"
as it gets practiced under this regime, which is to say as a
form of political control.

The purpose of V-Day, according to its promoters is to "stop
the violence now." Even a superficial reading of this text
makes that claim hard to believe. "I like to play with the
rim of the vagina," declaims one of the St. Marys
students, "my tongue is on her clitoris. My three fingers
are inside her vagina." Just what effect would descriptions
like this have on someone who is having a difficult time keeping
control of his sexual passion? Would it inspire chastity? The
avowed purpose of the V-Day celebration of masturbation and lesbianism
overlooks the connection between sexual passion and violence
that the ancients knew well enough and which lies at the heart
of the Catholic Churchs position in defense of modesty.

Exposure to pornography does not result in satiation, as the
now discredited Lockhart Commission claimed. It may result in
satiation to a particular picture or film, but at the same time
the viewer in becoming satiated simply requires a more bizarre
form of stimulation to achieve the excitement he previously received
with relatively 'normal' pornography. In addition exposure to
pornography creates in the viewer a fundamentally distorted view
of sexuality that can lead to assaults on women. In their article
"Massive Exposure to Pornography," published in 1984, Zillman and Bryant find that "massive exposure to pornography
fosters a general trivialization of rape. It can only be speculated
that this effect results from the characteristic portrayal of
women in pornography as socially nondiscriminating, as hysterically
euphoric in response to just about any and every sexual or pseudo-sexual
stimulation, and as eager to accommodate any and every sexual
request. Such a portrayal, it seems, convinces even women of
the hyperpromiscuous nature of women."

Many women learned about the connection between pornography
and violence the hard way after their boyfriends became addicted
to it. Some of these women were feminists. When Andrea Dworkin
and Catherine MacKinnon began to talk about pornography as violence
against women, they found themselves slapped down by the establishment
feminists, which as the name implies were feminists working for
the establishment, in this case the publishing industry with
its multiple ties to the pornography industry. The role Betty
Friedan played in all this is instructive for those who want
to understand connection between feminism and the financially
lucrative violence against women which is pornography and which
pornography inspires.

On January 21, 1986, Linda Boreman testified before the Meese
Commission in New York. During her testimony, she described being
kicked and beaten during the filming of Deep Throat in Miami
as well as being held in bondage by Chuck Traynor as a prostitute.
Perhaps sensing just how devastating Boremans testimony
would be, the masturbation industry organized a pre-emptive strike
a week before. On January 16, 1986, Betty Friedan and other prominenti,
organized a press conference that eventually got released as
a pamphlet entitled: The Meese Commission Exposed: Proceedings
of a National Coalition Against Censorship. In attendance, in
addition to Ms. Friedan were Kurt Vonnegut, Colleen Dewhurst,
who eventually became head of the National Endowment for the
Arts, and Harriet Pilpel of the ACLU, who made a career of defending
Alfred Kinsey long after the man was in his grave, threatening
to sue Pat Buchanan for a column he had written about Reismans
expose of the deceased sexologist.

Friedan, who made a career
out of portraying herself as sensitive to the needs of women,
not only ignored the testimony of women like
Linda Boreman, who
were tortured for the nation's sexual titillation, but actually
blamed them as traitors to their sex by collaborating with the
Reagan administration in general and Attorney General Meese in
particular. In fact, Friedan, ignoring the testimony of women
who were both degraded and physically injured as a result of
pornography-inspired sexual experimentation, outdid herself by
claiming that "suppressing pornography is extremely dangerous
to women." Friedan concluded her statement by claiming that
"the ultimate obscenity in America was murderous violence"
without the slightest indication that by 1986 the evidence about
the source of murderous violence in libido emancipated from morals
was all a matter of public record, the very record which Friedan's
testimony hoped to suppress.

And Ms. Friedan was so avid in her support of pornography because
the industry was in deep trouble at the time, primarily because
of the Meese Commission. On April 10, 1986, the president of
Southland Corporation, owner of 4,500 7-Eleven stores nationwide
announced that it would no longer sell Playboy, Penthouse, or
Forum magazines in its stores. The letter also made it clear
that Southland was basing its decision in part on "Judith
Reismans report before the Commissions hearing on
Child Pornography." Reismans testimony on "Images
of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler,"
had been given to the Commission on November 12, 1985, two weeks
before she had been driven out of her offices at American University,
where she had received a government grant to study the correlation
between Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler and child molestation.
Southlands announcement caused such a public furor that
other major drug and convenience stores as well as many "mom
and pop" stores followed suit, announcing that they too
were no longer going to offer the Playboy and other one-handed
magazines for sale in their stores.

On June 5, 1986, less than two months after Southland Corporation
announced that 7-Eleven would no longer be selling one-handed
magazines in its stores, Steve Johnson of Gray and Co. wrote
a letter to John M. Harrington, Executive Vice President of the
Council for Periodical Distributors Associations, thanking him
for their meeting a week before. In that meeting, attended also
by Gray and Co. associates Frank Mankiewicz and Ray Argyle, Johnson
and Harrington discussed the problems, both potential and actual,
which the Meese Commission, which was scheduled to release its
report in less than a month, posed to the publishing industry
as well as strategies, both long and short-term, to discredit
the commission. The publishing industry had formed an ad-hoc
committee called the Media Coalition to combat the Meese
Commission’s efforts.

Membership in the Media Coalition read
like the who’s who of the publishing industry and included: the
American Booksellers Association, the Association of American
Publishers, the Council of Periodical Distributors, the International
Periodical Distributors Association, and the National Coalition of
College Stores, which meant that some of them had a direct financial
interest in the sale of pornography, a fact which came up in the
Johnson letter, when he said that the financial interests of the Media
Coalition would have to be disguised by transferring the attention of
the public to First Amendment issues. That this was not going to be
easy or cheap became clear when Johnson began discussing the cost of
the project and arrived at a figure of $75,000 a month as his initial
estimate. Moreover, Gray was apparently only one of several PR firms
hired to help the Media Coalition.

The purpose of the campaign was to generate the illusion of widespread,
"grass-roots" support, when in fact Johnson himself
admitted in his memo that "the [Meese] Commissions
findings and recommendations will likely find widespread public
acceptance." In a society which claimed to be democratic,
it was essential to cloak the financial interests of those who
profited from exploiting sexuality behind a facade of "grass-roots"
support. Mendacity was essential to manipulation of this sort;
without it, the manipulation would not work.

The memo was also a good indication of
how the political system worked in the United States, but beyond that
it was also an indication of how commercialized lust functioned in
that system. The essence of a republic is devotion to the common good.
The essence of empire is power, the power not of the people, but of
one faction over another. Just as the republic needs virtue in order
to function, the empire runs on lust. Empire is politically organized
appetite. Each faction strives to use the power of the state to
gratify its own desires. As politicians succumb one by one to the lure
of money to ensure their election and re-election, the order of the
state becomes determined by those who pay the highest price for it.
Those with the most money control appetite. So to insure that they
stay in power, they promote unfettered appetite, feeling that the
ultimate outcome of what are essentially financial transactions will
be in their favor.

Wilhelm Reich felt that only socialism
could lead to sexual freedom, and that unfettered sexual freedom would
lead to socialism. It turns out that he was wrong. Capitalism was much
better at exploiting sexual appetite, and the political system it
created is much better at turning unfettered appetite into a form of
political control via economic exploitation. In the 1990s, unfettered
appetite meant charging a price for what used to be free. It meant the
reduction of all aspects of life, including the most intimate and
sacred, to a form of consumerism. It meant promoting bondage, both
spiritual and economic, in the name of freedom. Ultimately, the
followers of the Enlightenment believed what Augustine said when he
claimed in the City of God that a man had as many masters as he had
vices, but not in the way that Augustine said it. The Enlightenment
simply reversed the values while espousing essentially the same
concept. The Enlightenment promoted vice among its victims as a way of
becoming both their economic and political masters. Plato was right;
freedom of this sort did lead to slavery. Sexual liberation was a form
of political control.

Vagina Monologues
author Eve Ensler

This is not to say that the purpose of The Vagina Monologues
is to promote violence against women. The purpose of Deep Throat
was not to promote violence against women either. The purpose
of Deep Throat was to make money by pandering to base passion,
and in the course of doing just that it unleashed enormous amounts
of violence against women, as their testimony before the Meese
Commission on Pornography in the mid-80s made clear. The
purpose of The Vagina Monologues is various. Among the old and
jaded feminists of the first generation it generates the feeling
that everyone is as depraved as they are and that they are, therefore,
not so bad, and that feminism hasnt really wrecked their
lives as they fear in their more candid moments. The purpose
of The Vagina Monologues among a younger audience is different,
although no less pernicious. Its purpose is to promote unnatural
sex because unnatural sex is the best form of political control.

The plays promotion of masturbation makes that clear.
"Betty Dodson," we were told during a segment called
"The Vagina Workshop," "has been teaching women
for over 30 years to locate, love and masturbate their vaginas."
What followed was another graphic account of sexual activity,
this time of the autoerotic activity that takes place in Dodsons
"workshops." The name Betty Dodson is the Rosetta Stone
which unlocks the real meaning of The Vagina Monologues, especially
as performed for the benefit of Catholic college students. Dodson
featured prominently in Dusan Makavejevs film WR: Mysteries
of the Organism, the film which launched the Reich Revival in
the late 60s and early 70s. Reich was the pioneer
in what he called sex-pol work, which meant putting sex to political
use, in his case in Vienna and Berlin in the late 20s and
early 30s. Kate Millett took the concept of sex pol and
made it into the title of her book Sexual Politics, one of the
seminal feminist texts and also the one which made apparent that
the revival of feminism in the late 60s and the revival
of Reich were one and the same thing. Feminism was applied sex
pol, but having said that the same question applies to both feminism
and The Vagina Monologues: Cui bono?

In order to answer that question we have to describe the sides
in the Kulturkampf which raged throughout the German-speaking
world in the period between the two world wars. Reich was a communist
and a Freudian and as such his main opponent in Vienna was the
Catholic Church. After years of trying in vain to debate the
existence of God and getting nowhere in persuading people to
become atheistic communists, Reich noticed a simple fact. If
you changed the sexual behavior of idealistic young Catholics
in the direction of sexual liberation, which included masturbation,
then the idea of God simply evaporated from their minds and they
defected from the Catholic Church, and the way to successful
revolution was clear. The key to bringing about revolution was
changing sexual behavior, something he noticed in a communist
girl whose behavior he discusses in The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
The girl was in the habit of masturbating, when a woman brought
up the idea of divine punishment she stopped masturbating.

"The compulsion to pray," Reich writes, "disappeared
when she was made aware of the origin of her fear; this awareness
made it possible for her to masturbate again without feelings
of guilt. As improbable as this incident may appear, it is pregnant
with meaning for sex-economy. It shows how the mystical contagion
of our youth could be prevented [my emphasis]. (Mass Psychology,
p. 155).

The revolution which could bring about the overthrow of the
political power of the Catholic Church in Austria was based,
not on debate, but behavior: "We do not discuss the existence
or nonexistence of Godwe merely eliminate the sexual repressions
and dissolve the infantile ties to the parents" (p. 182).

"The inescapable conclusion of all this," Reich
concludes, "is that a clear sexual consciousness and a natural
regulation of sexual life must foredoom every form of mysticism;
that, in other words, natural sexuality is the arch enemy of
mystical religion. By carrying on an anti-sexual fight wherever
it can, making it the core of its dogmas and putting it in the
foreground of its mass propaganda, the church only attests to
the correctness of this interpretation." By getting people
to act contrary to the Churchs teaching on sexual morals,
Reich and his followers automatically limited its political influence.
The logical conclusion of this is also clear: the total sexualization
of a culture would mean the total extinction of the Church and
the classical state based on the moral law.

"The process of the uprooting of mysticism" is accomplished
more effectively, in other words, by deviant sexual behavior
than by debate over the existence of God or the nth thesis of
the Sixth International. Reich felt that sexual license would
win out over self-control in every instance, and he probably
felt that way based on his own experiences, where self-control
lost consistently. But he also was empirical enough to see the
same phenomenon in others. He mentions "clerics" who
find it impossible to continue in their vocation once they have
"felt on their own body" the "physical consequences"
of sexual license. (p. 182).

The real purpose of play like The Vagina Monologues is to
"uproot" the Catholic faith in the girls who attend
St. Marys College by promoting masturbation and deviant
sexual activity. The political implications of this insight are
clear, but they can be put into effect only after a cultural
revolution has taken control of the instruments of culture. In
other words, most people will not act out sexually in any consistent
fashion on their own. They will be cowed by social convention
into inhibition or brought by it to repentance. Reich noticed
the inhibiting effect of culture on his patients. He was also
quick to draw a conclusion which was the converse of the one
he discovered. If women are inhibited sexually by culture, changes
in the imagery promoted by the culture will bring about a change
in behavior, which will in turn bring about a change in values.

When I talk to a sexually inhibited woman in my office about
her sexual needs, I am confronted with her entire moralistic
apparatus. It is difficult for me to get through to her and to
convince her of anything. If, however, the same woman is exposed
to a mass atmosphere, is present, for instance, at a rally [or
a play] at which sexual needs are discussed clearly and openly
in medical and social terms, then she doesnt feel herself
to be alone. After all, the others are also listening to "forbidden
things." Her individual moralistic inhibition is offset
by a collective atmosphere of sexual affirmation, a new sex-economic
morality, which can paralyze (not eliminate!) her sexual negation
because she herself has had similar thoughts when she was alone.
Secretly, she herself has mourned her lost joy of life or yearned
for sexual happiness. The sexual need is given confidence by
the mass situation; it assumes a socially accepted status. When
the subject is broached correctly, the sexual demand proves to
have far more appeal than the demand for asceticism and renunciation;
it is more human, more closely related to the personality, unreservedly
affirmed by everyone. Thus, it is not a question of helping,
but of making suppression conscious, of dragging the fight between
sexuality and mysticism into the light of consciousness, of bringing
it to a head under the pressure of a mass ideology and translating
it into social action (p. 187).

The girls at St. Marys are like Lisa Palac, the queen
of cybersex, and author of another paean to masturbation, The
Edge of the Bed. Palac was raised a Catholic in a Polish family
in Chicago ( "I tell them I was raised Catholic. We all
have a good yuk over that one. Ah, Catholicism. Where sex is
dirty and the thrill of transgression is endless!" p. 7)
but before long she became a media supported promoter of masturbation
to pornography, which in Reichian terms is the best prophylaxis
against Catholicism.

In The Vagina Monologues and in Palacs book we find
the mirror image to the story that Reich recounts in the Mass
Psychology of Fascism. Lisa Palac is a Catholic girl who stopped
praying when she started masturbating; the girl Reich mentions
was a Communist girl who stopped masturbating when she started
praying. In both instances, the sexual dimensions of this political
struggle between the Enlightenment and the Catholic Church are
clear. Whoever determines sexual mores rules the state. Those
things remain constant. The details change but the big picture
remains. The cultural revolution in the United States during
the 60s was a replay of the cultural revolution in the
German-speaking world between the wars. Reich and his followers,
according to Sharaf, "wanted to wrest education from Catholic
hands and influence the minds of the young. The idea was to develop
the whole person; the aim, to build a socialist man."

That battle was simply transposed to American soil when many
of the cultural bolshevists were expelled by the Nazis and found
asylum in the United States. The "bitter political polarization
between the Christian Socialists with their rural Catholic constituency,
many still devoted to the monarchy, and the urban, secularly
oriented Social Democrats" simply got transposed to America,
where representatives of the declining Protestant elite like
Paul Blanshard opened up their institutions to people like Reich,
and Paul Tillich and Walter Gropius and the other cultural bolshevists
as a way of waging war on American Catholics, who were beginning
the demographic and consequent political resurgence that coincided
with the baby boom. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was the
WASP cultural counterattack against that Catholic resurgence.
During the 60s, the purpose of sexual liberation was to
convince women to use contraceptives. In the 90s, the purpose
of sexual liberation is to convince women to masturbate. The
goal in both instances is control. In the first instance, the
purpose was to wrest the sexual lives of Catholic women from
the hands of the Church as a way of weakening Catholic political
power, which was based on Catholic demographics. The fact that
the Church lost that battle meant that further fighting was necessary.
Now the daughters of women who took the pill are being exploited
financially and sexually in a more extreme and explicit fashion.
The only thing that changed during those 30 years was the extent
of the bondage.

If the moral order is the basis of repression, then reason
is repressive, and if reason is repressive, then man can only
become free by becoming irrational, and once he becomes irrational,
the only thing that drives him to act is his appetites, his impulses,
and his passions. But once man is driven by his passions, he
loses all control of his actions. Thus freedom of this sort,
as Plato rightly saw, becomes a form of slavery. Those who advocate
freedom of this sort are promoting, whether they understand it
or not, a form of social control because the motive for action
which previously lay in reason has now been replaced by the stimulation
of passion. Those who control the stimuli now control the stimulated.
The purpose of transgressive imagery is social control. Those
who relinquish reason are controlled by their passions, which
are exploited financially and politically by those who control
the flow of transgressive imagery. The people who profit financially
from promoting the imagery contribute to the election of those
who will protect it politically, and so a form of political control
evolves from a system of financial exploitation.

What we see in the performance of The Vagina Monologues at
this soi disant Catholic college is an attempt to break down
the defense against exploitation which modesty provides as a
prelude to sexual and political colonization. The colonization
takes place on a personal level, by inculcating bad habits, and
then it entails organizing those bad habits politically into
something like feminism. The brochure handed out before the play
made clear that "professional, one-on-one support [was]
available through the performance as well as following the performance."
The young ladies were then enjoined to "join us for discussion
after the performance." "Those interested in volunteering
to make a change in lives of women, " were urged to "stop
by and sign up." Like the womens shelters which the
St. Marys students are urged to staff, The Vagina Monologues
becomes a way identifying those who can be subjected to more
intense forms of social and sexual engineering. The more they
follow this path the more vulnerable they become to more and
more ruthless forms of exploitation.

Which brings us back again to the purpose of modesty, which
the Catechism describes as inspiring "a way of life which
makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the
pressures of prevailing ideologies." As one of the ladies
who has written one of the many books promoting pornography said,
watching pornography fosters a culture in which people "say
yes to appetite," and getting its citizens to say yes to
appetite is the main way this regime controls them. This is true
of all forms of advertising, but the more intimate the appetite
the more total the control. Since modesty is a form of protection,
getting these girls to violate that modesty is simply a way of
subjecting them to the most ruthless sort of economic exploitation
and political control.

Just why Catholic parents should pay $20,000 a year for the
privilege of having St. Marys College do this to their
daughters is anyones guess. The prime reason this happens
is because of the mendacity of the college administration. St.
Marys bills itself as a Catholic college for women, but
it is in reality a feminist college for Catholics. Parents send
their children there thinking they are going to get a Catholic
education when in fact they are paying to have their childrens
faith and morals subverted. The college maintains this illusion
by rigorously controlling the flow of information to the alumnae.
There are many things which will never appear in the alumnae
magazine. One of them is an accurate description of the performance
of The Vagina Monologues that took place at Madeleva Hall. In
lieu of that description, the college will send to its alumnae
more contribution envelopes graced with pictures of the Virgin
Mary.

To be fair to the college, one has to add that liberal Catholics
are avid to be deceived on sexual issues. They accepted contraception
thinking that they could simply use it as a way of limiting the
number of children they had. In making this Faustian pact, they
got more than they bargained for. What they didnt understand
is that contraception causes not only drive-by shootings but
the complete unraveling of the social fabric. As part of that
unraveling it brought about the complete subversion of Catholic
education. It also brought about an ineluctable endorsement of
homosexuality. The parents who contracept dont want to
know the truth, not the truth about sex or anything else, and
so they end up paying $20,000 a year to have their daughters
recruited into the ranks of political lesbianism regardless of
what their intentions are on the matter. The logic of subversion
is inexorable.

When the first line of defense against the subversion of Catholic
education fails, it is up to the bishop to protect the young
ladies there against this type of ideological exploitation. The
bishop, unfortunately, has been like a deer caught in the headlights
of an oncoming car for 15 years now. The more he contemplates
the situation, the more paralyzed he becomes. His last contribution
to the ongoing crisis was to attack the Vatican proposal calling
for a juridical relationship between Catholic colleges and the
Church and propose more dialogue on the issue instead. Is The
Vagina Monologues what the bishop had in mind when he called
for more dialogue? Is his idea of dialogue listening to one of
the nuns under his jurisdiction leading a chorus of Catholic
teenagers in chanting the word cunt? If so, he should reread
the catechism on moral permissiveness, something which is based
on "an erroneous concept of human freedom." True freedom
on the other hand, has one "necessary precondition"
and that is "to let oneself be educated in the moral law.
Those in charge of education can reasonably be expected to give
young people instruction respectful of the truth, the qualities
of the heart and the moral and spiritual dignity of man."